Shots Fired

Blessed are you who weep now,
    for you will laugh.
                   --Luke 6:26b

Shootings have become so routine we even have a routine for responding--
Pray for the victims and the community
Praise everyone who responded to help
Politicians make statements of horror, regret, and hope
...and then the mikes fall silent.

The fourth step trips us up again and again and again.

A few years ago, after the Sandy Hook school shooting, I wrote here about the need to disarm. We still remain fully armed. In Georgia, it is legal to carry openly, even into church. Other states are similarly libertarian about guns. Guns are an American stereotype. 

They also are weapons of mass destruction. Here is a startling observation--

"Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns (including suicides, murders and accidents) than the sum total of all the Americans who died in all the wars in American history, back to the American Revolution. 

Every day, some 92 Americans die from guns, and American kids are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children in other developed countries" (David Hemenway of Harvard, as quoted in NYTimes, Oct. 2, 2017)

The numbers are inescapable. They are right there for all to see.

In the Beatitudes, Jesus names the blessed. We tend to read them as a list. I believe Jesus meant them as a process.

If you read through Matthew's record of the Beatitudes (Mt. 5), you see the process--one moves from humility into gracious action until one's gracious action is completely who one is, so much so that the world cannot miss who and what you are and the world will react to you. 

Some find that frightening.

I find it hopeful.

Our hope is in and only in our ability to embody the compassion of Jesus. Our tendency to lift him out of human experience, emphasizing his divinity, and thereby excepting ourselves from ever being able to model his compassion because it is existentially inhuman is our failing. Jesus came to show us the way to be fully human, living into the highest form of human expression there is--to love one another self-emptyingly, so that all can be full. He is the way, the truth, and the life because he is the way to be fully human. 

Love one another.

In response to Las Vegas, we have no option but to respond in love. Love is not just saying how much we care, offering prayers, and shaking our heads. It is radically reorienting our context so that less and less people die instead of watching the numbers continue to rise and rise. Las Vegas set a record. Do we really want to see it broken? If nothing changes, it will be broken. And broken again. And again. 

Are we willing to lose ourselves to save our neighbors?

The numbers are inescapable.